Regex to match text between commas

Question

I'm going nuts trying to get a regex to detect spam of keywords in the user inputs. Usually there is some normal text at the start and the keyword spam at the end, separated by commas or other chars.

What I need is a regex to count the number of keywords to flag the text for a human to check it.

The text is usually like this:

[random text, with commas, dots and all]

keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4, keyword5,
Keyword6, keyword7, keyword8...

I've tried several regex to count the matches:

-This only gets one out of two keywords

[,-](\w|\s)+[,-]

-This also matches the random text

(?:([^,-]*)(?:[^,-]|$))

Can anyone tell me a regex to do this? Or should I take a different approach?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Pr your answer to my question, here is a regexp to match a string that occurs between two commas.

(?<=,)[^,]+(?=,)

This regexp does not match, and hence do not consume, the delimiting commas. This regexp would match " and hence do not consume" in the previous sentence.

The fact that your regexp matched and consumed the commas was the reason why your attempted regexp only matched every other candidate.

Also if the whole input is a single string you will want to prevent linebreaks. In that case you will want to use;

(?<=,)[^,\n]+(?=,)

http://www.phpliveregex.com/p/1DJ